The truth about EVs, windmills, solar panels, and other "green" stuff

As an environmental scientist, I used to get asked about climate change all the time.

Is it happening? Is it caused by people? How worried should I be?

I was always grateful for these questions. Regardless of the person’s background, they were reaching out to learn about a politicized issue that can be confusing and intimidating. I felt privileged that they trusted me enough to ask.

Though this post isn’t about climate change, the short answer to those questions is yes, yes, and very. If you want more detail, here are three of my favorite resources:

1. BYU’s course on climate change science andsolutions
2. Project Drawdown’s Climate 101 series
3. Skeptical Science’s ugly but accurate wiki

Cool sky at my brother's birthday party.

While I still get asked about climate change, a different set of questions have become dominant over the past few years.

Don’t solar panels take more energy to manufacture than they produce? Aren’t windmills only built because they are subsidized? Isn’t the ecological footprint of an EV greater than a gas car?

I see the evolution in questioning as an enormously positive sign. We are no longer in the “is there a problem” stage. We have graduated into the “what are the best solutions” stage, which is infinitely more useful and stimulating.

Given the rate of change in the renewable energy space, it’s no wonder that people are hearing more about these technologies. Last year, more than 90% of the new energy production built was wind and solar. This isn’t because of subsidies or regulation—fossil fuels still have huge structural advantages there. Despite the fact that fossil fuel pollution causes approximately 1 in 5 deaths globally (10.2 million a year)^1,2, we invest more than three times the direct subsidies into fossil fuels than renewable energy³.

Figure 1 From Errigo et al. 2020. Estimates of premature deaths caused by pollution and other causes and risk factors worldwide. Deaths associated with COVID-19 were current on 9 October 2020. 

If it’s not big government picking winners and losers, why are we hearing so much more about wind and solar? This quiet and clean revolution is happening because solar photovoltaic and wind power are now providing the cheapest energy ever available to humankind⁴. The cost of solar has decreased by 90% in the past 10 years, and the cost of lithium-ion batteries has declined by 95%.

A cost comparison of various energy sources. The levelized cost includes all manufacturing, installation, and operating costs over the life of the unit, allowing direct comparison across very different technologies. This is a sneak peek from a forthcoming paper with data from Lazard and IRENA.

But back to our questions. Isn’t this whole green thing a scam?

One of the most prominent ecologists of the 20^th century was Barry Commoner. He called ecology, the “Science of survival,” referring to all the organisms on Earth, including humans. 

Because ecology is a study of complex interactions (systems of systems), we usually don’t think of universal laws relating to ecological interactions. However, Commoner was a rebel, and he proposed four ecological laws:

1. Everything is connected to everything else
2. Everything must go somewhere
3. Nature knows best
4. There aint no such thing as a free lunch

While each of these laws deserves its own seminar, I think that #4 is especially pertinent to questions about renewables and electrified technologies. This law posits that every activity has an ecological cost. For example, all animals are heterotrophs—organisms that can’t harvest energy from the sun or inorganic chemicals. This means that we must eat other organisms to survive. Riding a bicycle has an ecological cost: the materials and energy to construct it, maintain it, and operate it. This is where I see many people get confused about more sustainable technologies and behaviors. While all lunches have a cost, law #4 does not posit that all lunches cost the same.

Many critics rightfully point out that EVs and solar panels have ecological costs. They are not, and cannot be, a “free lunch.” From an ecological perspective, the question is never, “is the lunch free,” but “how much does it cost.”

Because of the complexity of our globalized world (anyone else a huge fan of the “Good Place”?), answering the question of how much a particular product or activity costs ecologically is really complicated. Indeed, there is a whole scientific field dedicated to assessing ecological impact: life-cycle analysis (LCA). Researchers in LCA do detailed accounting to quantify the overall environmental impact of an object or activity from cradle to grave (or cradle to cradle in the case of circular production approaches). They assess how much energy, pollution, and habitat loss are created by extraction of the raw materials followed by the manufacturing, distribution, use, and disposal of the product.

While LCA is a painfully meticulous research activity, it reveals the price column on the menu of life. For example, eating a plant-based diet only uses 15% of the energy and 25% of the land required by the typical American diet^5,6. Riding a bicycle uses less than 1% of the energy required to drive a car⁷. Driving an electric car produces much more pollution than a bicycle but 75% less greenhouse gas and a tiny fraction of the local pollution of a gas- or diesel-powered car^8,9. Solar panels and wind turbines recoup their initial energy and pollution costs within 1-5 months, producing less than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions of their fossil fuel equivalents per kWh^10,11. Most encouraging, the ecological cost of all these green technologies (from bicycles to solar panels) is decreasing as global manufacturing and transportation becomes cleaner. For example, Tesla’s gigafactories are nearing 100% solar, and new techniques for extracting lithium from deep groundwater brines allow efficient extraction without expansive evaporation pools¹².

A figure from Kim et al. 2020, which compared the greenhouse gas footprint of different diets in 140 countries.

Pro-tip #1, when given a choice, pick the cheaper lunch.

I think there is a deeply engrained human instinct to resent hypocrisy. This can be an influence for good, especially when we apply it to ourselves. However, it can also lead us to reject legitimate improvements just because they are not complete solutions. Are solar panels, windmills, electric cars, and heat pumps impact free? Absolutely not. That would infringe one of the only laws of ecology. Are they better than the current coal, gas, and internal combustion engine alternatives? Yes. They are so much better that we should be doing everything in our power to encourage their uptake. This is literally a matter of life and death for millions of people worldwide. Whether you are in a “sensitive group” or you are completely healthy, air pollution harms every system in our body: respiratory, reproductive, neurological, cardiovascular, and mental².

In addition to decreasing harm from pollution and climate change, there are another suite of reasons to embrace the clean energy revolution. Cleaning up our electricity, transportation, and heating is going to create millions of high-paying jobs in every zip code of the United States. There are approximately 1.14 million jobs currently associated with coal, gas, and oil extraction and processing nationwide. The renewable transition will create more than 25 million jobs nationwide, including manufacturing, installation, financing, sales, transportation, construction, and education¹³. The laborers and engineers currently in fossil fuel can be directly transitioned to jobs requiring the same skills in transmission, maintenance, raw materials, and permitting. We need these workers and companies to pull this off. If we remove the regulatory and political obstacles that are behind our current situation of expensive and dirty energy¹⁴, we can have a cleaner, wealthier, and more abundant life for all of us.

Figure 8 from Griffith and Calisch 2020. This shows the new clean energy jobs that would be created in the U.S. were we to commit to halving greenhouse gas emissions each decade until reaching zero emissions.

Last winter, my mom purchased a Chevy Bolt. A couple weeks ago, I was on a forum to see how the new version compared, and surprise surprise, people were fighting about whether EVs were better than gas and diesel cars. In the midst of long and usually data-free opinions, some dude from Wisconsin blurted in all caps,

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT. THE CAR HAS WAY BETTER PERFORMANCE AND HARDLY COSTS ANYTHING TO OPERATE.”

This is one of the many signs that renewables are winning. If you have money to invest or things to purchase, I invite you to put it towards clean—though imperfect—electric technologies. If you are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or member of the Independent American Party of Utah, call up your state representatives and encourage them to streamline manufacturing and deployment of renewable energy. Whether you voted for Trump, Biden, or Jo Jorgensen, don't miss out on the personal, financial, and environmental benefits of these new technologies.

If you have questions or challenges, I would be honored to hear them. If you want more information, here are some good sources:

1. Rewiring America (Other Labs)
2. 3 clean energy myths debunked (Yale)
3. Interview with Saul Griffiths on renewable jobs (VOX)
4. De-risking renewable energy projects (Forbes)
5. Low-cost renewable electricity as the key driver of the global energy transition towards sustainability  (Energy)
6. Are electric vehicles really better for the climate? (Union of Concerned Scientists)
7. Our Energy Library clearing house for articles and reports on fossil fuels and renewables (Our Energy Policy)
8. The 2035 Report (Energy Innovation)
9. The Electrify This! podcase (Sara Baldwin)

 References

1. Vohra, K. et al. Global mortality from outdoor fine particle pollution generated by fossil fuel combustion: Results from GEOS-Chem. Environ. Res. 195, 110754 (2021).
2. Errigo, I. M. et al. Human Health and Economic Costs of Air Pollution in Utah: An Expert Assessment. Atmosphere 11, 1238 (2020).
3. Coady, D., Parry, I., Le, N.-P. & Shang, B. Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates. IMF Work. Pap. 19, 1 (2019).
4. Bogdanov, D. et al. Low-cost renewable electricity as the key driver of the global energy transition towards sustainability. Energy 120467 (2021) doi:10.1016/j.energy.2021.120467.
5. If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares. Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets.
6. Kim, B. F. et al. Country-specific dietary shifts to mitigate climate and water crises. Glob. Environ. Change 62, 101926 (2020).
7. Hollingsworth, J., Copeland, B. & Johnson, J. X. Are e-scooters polluters? The environmental impacts of shared dockless electric scooters. Environ. Res. Lett. 14, 084031 (2019).
8. Choma, E. F., Evans, J. S., Hammitt, J. K., Gómez-Ibáñez, J. A. & Spengler, J. D. Assessing the health impacts of electric vehicles through air pollution in the United States. Environ. Int. 144, 106015 (2020).
9. How Clean is Your Electric Vehicle? Union of Concerned Scientists https://evtool.ucsusa.org.
10. Haapala, K. R. & Prempreeda, P. Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines. Int. J. Sustain. Manuf. 3, 170 (2014).
11. NREL. Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Solar Photovoltaics. 3 https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf (2013).
12. Tscherning, R. & Chapman, B. Navigating the emerging lithium rush: lithium extraction from brines for clean-tech battery storage technologies. J. Energy Nat. Resour. Law 39, 13–42 (2021).
13. Griffith, S. & Calisch, S. Jobs, jobs, jobs, and more jobs. 34 (2020).
14. Stokes, L. C. Short Circuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States. (Oxford University Press, 2020).